I picked up a Nikon D80 a couple of months ago and slowly but surely it has come to dominate my life. I’ve become completely obsessed with photography (again, after a 15 year layoff). So far, I’ve got two major influences steering me towards photographic greatness: A series of very practical columns about photographic composition by Ben Lifeson, and the vast number of truly incredible photographers on Flickr, including Chris Iseli, my current de-facto photographic mentor. You can see my Flickr site here.
Another post from the Why Didn’t I Know About This Sooner Department…
I’ve gotten totally fed up with IE 7 slow load syndrome and frequent crashes and freezes so I’m officially jumping to full-time use of Firefox. I’ve explored Firefox plugins a bit and among other things I’ve discovered these awesome plugins:
Sage — an inline RSS reader and OPML editor. Potentially replaces Google Reader
FireFTP — and inline FTP client. Replaces CoreFTP
Performancing — Using it right now to publish this post to my blog(s). This one is too good to be true.
These plugins and many more are available at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/plugins/
powered by performancing firefox
Check out what I’m listening to in the on-air section of my sidebar and see what I’m doing (or was doing last time I was in my office) on my webcam. The iTunes monitor is a cool Wordpress Plugin called, naturally, wpitunes. The webcam is upported with an open source application called Fwink.
You can also see my lastest Flickr posts here, if you’re interested.
Steve Rubel’s latest post on the “the long tail” (and linked Wikipedia article) does a great job of articulating how long-term cumulative returns are where the real ROI can be found for our Web 2.0 initiatives. Steve uses the example of a professional blog but I think it holds true for the stuff we’re doing in higher-ed as well — Podcasts, blogs, MySpace pages, etc. It’s a cumulative market presence that will bear-out over the long-haul. Not a big bang.